Wilhelm Kobelt

Wilhelm Kobelt (20 February 1840 to 26 March 1916) was a German zoologist born in Alsfeld in the Grand Duchy of Hesse, who specialized in malacology and contributed to studies on the biogeography of freshwater molluscs. The eldest son of a parish priest, he studied medicine at the University of Gießen from 1857 and received a doctorate in 1862 with a dissertation on cardiac arrest. He practised as a physician in Biedenkopf, where he began a natural history society, and from 1869 worked at Schwanheim near Frankfurt am Main until 1880. He became interested in molluscs and, after the death of Emil Adolf Rossmässler in 1868, carried out further work on his collections. He became head of the mollusc section of the Senckenberg nature research society and later curator of the Senckenberg Museum, and founded the German Malacological Society and a journal for malacology. From 1885 he published an annual report on mollusc systematics, and in 1871 he speculated that small bivalves and operculate snails might survive the guts of birds and be dispersed by them. He bequeathed his collections to the Senckenberg Museum.